THE TERRORDROME CANNOT BE STOPPED: MARCH 2026

Wraith

        March 25, 2026

THE TERRORDROME CANNOT BE STOPPED: MARCH 2026
March 2026: Secret Projects, Sapphic Ghosts, and Video Games in Bed.

        Newsletter 6, Mar 2026
WELCOME TO THE TERRORDROME. It is lovely to have you.
TERRORDROME DISPATCHES are sent out once a month, and are a great way to keep up with my horrible trash.
(I’m also on Bluesky as @cyborgurl.)
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ANNA ANTHROPY PATCH NOTES: MARCH 2026
Unfortunately, there is little to report this month, as I spent the whole month  working on the first draft of a contract project that I can’t talk about yet.

I’ve been so single-minded in my focus because my niblings are visiting me at the end of the month! It will be the first time I’ve seen them since before the pandemic (they were literal babies the last time we interacted).

That being said, I’m excited about the work I’m doing currently and can’t wait to eventually show it to you!
A game I made 18 years ago showed up on my favorite abandonware site today. How have I been making games this long?
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MS-DOS GAMES THAT MADE ME GAY, PART 1: WRAITH
Wraith was the 1995 creation of Dr. Dungeon, the penultimate in his series of “Ultizerk” shareware games. These were essentially Ultima (the CRPG series by Origin) fan games.
Wraith is a departure from the previous Ultizerks, taking its inspiration from 1990’s Ultima VI: The False Prophet, which introduces what we might today think of as “immersive sim” mechanics to the series.
Image description: Pixel screenshot of Wraith. The left side of the image is a top-down view of a human character fighting a large spider on the steps of some raised structure. The right side is a character portrait of a brown-haired, blue-eyed woman along with an inventory display. A message reads, “Dungeon Spider hit! Life: 11.”
In Wraith, this manifests in tools like a watch you can check to learn the time and a bedroll you can use to sleep when it gets late. You can fill a bucket at the river and dump it on the grass to grow flowers. There’s a kind of dynamic lighting system where the screen grows dimmer when you’re out of view of torches.
But the thing that made an impact on me at age twelve was: It was the first game that allowed me to play a gay character.
Image description: A ghostly greyscale woman with green eyes addresses the player character. “Come and let me look in thine eyes! For they art filled with stars. Windows to the soul — channel of thy heart…”
The player is asked to perform a series of quests for a mysterious, ghostly woman (the titular Wraith). Over the course of the game, it is gradually revealed (your character has magic amnesia, or something) that the wraith lady is the player’s former lover, trying to reconnect with them.
When creating a character, the player chooses their gender. Whether by oversight or by design, when playing a woman character, the dialogue is unchanged. After talking to the wraith, the player character asks, “Why do I feel attracted to her?” (The love story is a load-bearing plot element, to be sure.)
It is worth noting that if you click on the “the story so far” option on the opening menu, you get a version of the story that uses he/him pronouns for the player character.
Image description: In this screenshot, the player character stands in a grassy patch in a cave, surrounded by red flowers. A message reads, “Flowers have appeared!”
It is, I suspect, not a particularly complex romance. Most of the game’s quests involve fetching gifts and jewelry for the wraith. Nevertheless, this game had a huge impact on me as a gay little child in the 90s.
The shareware episode (representing the first half of the game) builds to the moment where the lovers (re-)meet in person — she wasn’t dead after all! Because I had no money as a kid, I never registered the game, and never got to see how it all turned out.
If you want to try the game yourself, you can find it for download at dosgames. It does not run well in vanilla Dosbox, but I’ve had great success running it in Dosbox Staging.
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TRANS DAY OF VISIBILITY OBLIGATORY PHOTO
Image description: A fat white femme in a lacy black cleavage-revealing top, seated in a power chair. It is twilight and a park is visible in the background.
Photo taken mere days before a haircut.
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WHAT HAVE I BEEN PLAYING CORNER: CHRONIC PAIN EDITION
The Chicago weather has been ping-ponging between warm and freezing lately, which has meant I've been doing most of my game-playing in bed while waiting for chronic pain to subside. Thankfully, I have a Miyoo Mini, probably the best digital game device I've ever owned; here's what I've been playing on it.
Metal Max Returns. A Mad Max-inspired Super Famicom game that blends a JRPG play vocabulary with a CRPG-style sandbox structure. I've been playing mostly without instructions, just working out systems as I go, and I've spent over ten hours with it so far.
Loose Ties. A Pico-8 roguelike (or Broughlike? What even are genres?) about deduction rather than combat. You navigate a series of abstract house parties, using a limited set of interactions to determine which of the guests fits which behavior archetype (for example, the Boor is happy to talk to you, but will give any other nearby guest "bad vibes").
Wumpus. A NES port of the TI-99 version of Hunt the Wumpus, which turned the game from a mapping puzzle into something closer to Minesweeper. I've always just loved the visual design of this thing. The highest difficulty level is kicking my ass.
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And that’s this month! From our terrordrome to yours: Stay soft, stay strong, stay nasty.

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